Parisa Mehran

Tag Archives: SAM

In our poster presentation at JALT CALL 2017, Mehrasa and I focused on the design and development phases of an online course of English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP), which we have referred to as Osaka University Global English Online (OUGEO).

Unlike ADDIE’s five giant sequential steps, SAM (Successive Approximation Model) is an iterative, cyclical, and agile approach to instructional design which tries to address the roadblocks in the way of instructional designers in repeated small steps.

Following that, we explained the intertwined design and development phases of our prospective online course, which include the following: Assessing students’ needs and technological skills, defining the course overall goal and learning objectives, determining online course technologies, requirements, accessibility, connectivity, and support system, developing course syllabus, instructional materials (available via these hashtags: #OsakaUniversityGlobalEnglishOnline #OUGEO), tasks and activities, objective-based assessment, management strategies for team teaching, and formative and summative course evaluation. We also discussed copyright restrictions, the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs), as well as several e-learning authoring tools and their merits and demerits. Finally, we touched upon issues related to quality assurance with reference to the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric.

Despite the rapid growth of online teaching and learning at institutes of higher education worldwide, switching to online courses can pose a great challenge to those involved in creating and administering them. In our presentation at Osaka JALT Back to School 2017, Mehrasa and I tried to simplify, clarify, and exemplify the process of online course design.

We focused on practices that we found successful in designing online English courses based on the related literature and our hands-on experience as online instructional designers.

Under the project title of Osaka University Global English Online (OUGEO), we designed and developed, and are now implementing, a blended course of English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) at Osaka University targeting second-year undergraduate students for a period of 15 weeks, of which 10 sessions are purely online and 5 sessions are face-to-face.